Sunday, November 23, 2014

UFOs and Churchill's horse in official papers

Flying Saucer reports and Winston Churchill's hopes of bringing his horse
to Ireland to run in the Derby are in a newly published volume of documents on
Irish foreign policy.

The latest volume covers
the work of Irish diplomats in the 1948-51 period when the first Inter-Party
government was formed under Taoiseach John A Costello and the Irish Free State
left the Commonwealth to become a republic.

Intense interest in
reported UFO sightings in the skies over the US in 1950 prompted the Irish
embassy in Washington to send a report to Dublin.

An embassy staffer,
while saying he was making no commitment as to whether he believed such flying
saucer reports, asked that his report "be sent to G2, Irish military
intelligence".

In 1948, former British
Prime Minister Winston Churchill told Ireland's ambassador at a Remembrance Day
ceremony in London of his hopes for a united Ireland.

"I still hope for a
united Ireland. You must get those fellows from the north in, though you can't
do it by force. There is not, and never was, any bitterness in my heart towards
your country," he said.

Churchill, who spent
four years in Dublin as a child when his grandfather was viceroy, had hoped to
visit Ireland in 1951 as his horse, Canyon Kid, was to run in the Irish Derby,
but the horse died of heart failure.

"I would have liked
to have gone over and I'm sure the people would have given me a good reception
- particularly if my horse had won. The Irish are a sporting people,"
Churchill said.

Mr Flanagan said the
document collection showed Irish foreign policy was strongly influenced by
Catholicism. In the first days of the Inter-Party government, a "message
of filial piety" was sent to the Pope.

Documents show this
extended to interfering in Italy's elections.

"We see Ireland's
ambassador to the Holy See, Joseph Walshe, petitioning MacBride to divert
Secret Service monies to help the Christian Democrats defeat the Communists in
the 1948 Italian general election," Mr Flanagan remarked.

The publication of old
foreign policy documents is a project of the Department of Foreign Affairs, the
Royal Irish Academy and the National Archives.